


I don't say nothing (cause nothing's enough)

by pinecone_espresso



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Anastasia gets revenge, Crack Treated Seriously, Edward is tired, It's ok we love her, Multi, Olivier facilitates revenge, Olivier is a little crazy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:21:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27649472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinecone_espresso/pseuds/pinecone_espresso
Summary: Edward doesn't know how this couple got to Amestris, but he doesn't want to defend the new President against them. Anastasia, though? This is just the push she needs to get the revenge she's due. Rated M for Ana and Christian's existence, but not their actions. CoS/Brotherhood elements combined for author's vibe reasons.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Winry Rockbell, Riza Hawkeye/Roy Mustang, anastasia steele/basic decency and respect
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	I don't say nothing (cause nothing's enough)

Edward Elric is used to world-hopping and fancy parties. He wishes he wasn’t familiar with either, though, and he certainly doesn’t want to combine them. Both make him feel vaguely nauseous, and they're worse combined. Well, that could also be the overabundance of unfamiliar types of cheese he's tried, but he stands by his point regardless. He doesn't like interdimensional travel. 

Parties make Alphones vaguely giddy, though, even after a good few years in his body. Edward smiles at the sight of him dancing. It almost makes it worth it. Alphonse isn't on the job tonight, so it falls to Edward to look after the President. Figures it'd just be him when some of the guests are from the great elsewhere. Those always cause the most trouble. 

Neither of the brothers get sent to other worlds, but they deal with guests from such places rather often. They know the way, have for a long time now, and nobody has asked. No one wants to put them through that again, not yet, maybe not ever. Hawkeye isn't quite a parent, more like a protective older sister. She's the President's right hand, manages the team closest to him. She cares for them, never challenges more than they can handle, knows their limits. 

It's a blessing that she's here. 

It feels like a small blessing at the moment. 

This couple is bothering him. They showed up in the middle of the evening and he could tell immediately where they'd come from. It's obvious when you know what to look for. So many people are unaware that they stand out at first. They don't know how obvious they're being. He can sense it, smell it, see the way the air doesn’t quite fit around them properly yet. They could be alchemists. Hell, they could be anything.

Roy has chosen not to confront them quite yet, and that means Edward can't drag them off to one of the Armstrong's many spare rooms and interrogate them. Roy prefers not to show his hand right away, whether with his own opponents in government, visitors, or strangers to their world itself, he would rather observe from afar, laying his cards down one by one only when he can't wring any more out of watching.

So it's Edward's job to stand back and ascertain what he can from here. 

He doesn’t know who they are, but they aren’t about to do him any good. They’re going to start a fight, he can tell. And it’s on him to protect the new President, and he’s already three glasses deep. He wasn’t expecting conflict, wasn’t expecting these people, his balance is _off._ Roy's rule has been far too peaceful since he rose to power. Edward has not lost his edge, but it's harder to summon than it used to be. 

Al is unbalanced too, but Al doesn’t have to do anything tonight. Al has just turned twenty-one, he has a right to be unbalanced. 

Here’s the problem: Olivier Armstrong is chatting up the girl, and the man that came with her is glaring like he can send the General to hell with a glance. He can’t. Nobody can send Olivier to hell - she braves the cold too well already. Edward is more than on the side of Dante after visiting Briggs only a handful of times. Hell is cold. 

Well, he muses, it hasn’t been a ball at the Armstrong manor if Olivier hasn’t drawn her sword, so - perhaps the fight, when it happens, will wrap everything up and then he can sleep. At home or in a guest room Olivier offers him out of remorse, he doesn't care. The Armstrongs make a damn good breakfast. 

“Penny for your thoughts?” Roy asks, sidling up to him, and here’s the other problem: they’re supposed to be equals now, and he doesn’t know how to handle it, doesn’t understand yet that he can voice his thoughts without snark and be heard, doesn’t know how to interact with this man unless Roy's the superior, unless Roy is the barrier and the path between himself and freedom, respected and resented at once. 

This man practically raised him, and now they’re the same height, Edward is guarding him, he almost feels familiar as an old friend - almost, if you really squint through the fact that Roy used him as a weapon once, when he was too young to be anything of the kind and yet too single-minded to be bad at it. That’s the saving grace, of course. Everybody did their jobs in the end. Everybody got what they wanted. The whole thing could’ve burned around them so easy. 

Sometimes he gets a sense of how precarious it all was, before they were re-embodied, before they got home. It’s never a good feeling. 

“What do I think about what, _President?”_

Edward always says ‘ _President’_ with an edge of mockery. He can’t help it. Someone needs to remind Roy not to get too big of a head, and it’s not going to be anybody on his team. He might be deflated back to normal size by Riza if he could see past the stars he’s got in his eyes for her, but - well. That's a long-lost cause. Edward realized at about fifteen that Roy was hopelessly in love with Riza. Whether Riza returns those feelings he doesn't know. It isn't his place. Edward never mentioned the longing he saw on Roy's face, and he still doesn't. It feels too intimate to admit. 

Roy nods toward Olivier and this woman from another world. 

“Oh. Well, I’m pretty sure the guy she came with is going to attack the General, and then the General’s gonna probably stab him.” 

“So violent, Edward,” Roy laughs, and that’s new too. Roy didn't laugh before. 

“We all know the General, don’t we? And this guy looks like a jealous boyfriend”

Olivier is kind of a rake in Central, which nobody expected, given her reputation for ruthlessness within the military. There's always half a dozen men upset that she "stole their girlfriends" nowadays. Olivier insists that it's not her fault, she's just better at dating women than these men are, but Edward sometimes thinks she means to provoke them. It gives her the attention of a pretty girl and the adrenaline of a good fight all at once. That's exactly the sort of thing she goes for. 

She's less of a menace to the male population at Briggs, where she rules, but in Central, where she doesn't, she has time and energy to spare. So she flirts. It's funny - she professes to hate Roy, but is rather like him in some ways.

Said General is now bowing, holding her hand out to this dark-haired young woman who is dressed for another climate, another universe. She’s wearing a silver gown with the thinnest of straps holding it up, heels too high to stand in, and she’s beautiful, and she’s too thin, and she’s afraid. It's in her face. Whether of Olivier, or how this man she's with will react, or of whatever brought her to crossing worlds, she's scared.

He wants to make a joke: she’s afraid because everyone around her has sleeves and she doesn't, something dumb like that, but he turns to Roy and the words catch. Roy's face, handsomely brooding most of the time, looks genuinely troubled as he watches the exchange. Edward understands. Something in this woman's eyes is too wary. Shattered. Edward isn’t great at reading people, so the fact that he can read this means she’s practically telegraphing it. He wonders what extra dimensions Roy can see. 

Olivier’s kind of a jerk, he thinks, for approaching her like a conquest. She needs _help._

The woman folds her hands and takes a step back, shaking her head. The man she came with looks slightly less murderous. She turns to look at him. Edward looks away. 

“Why are they here?” Edward hisses. 

“Seems that man is powerful in his world." 

That much is obvious from the way he stands and the way he's dressed. Edward fails to see how it matters.

“So?” 

“So he found a way to ours.” 

Edward isn’t sure power translates to crossing. In fact, he thinks, it doesn't. The man looks too controlled. Too buttoned-up to cross. Edward's own moments of going between the worlds have been the lowest and most desperate of his life. Times when he was willing to give anything just to escape, to save his brother, to get home, whatever. He’s only crossed when he’s had no other choice. 

Alphonse spins off the dance floor and grins at them, making his way over through the crowd. Edward can’t help feeling some joy at this. Although this night will come to blows, and he won’t be happy about it, Alphonse has never lost that first cheerfulness that he had when he got his body back, has never lost his wonder. 

“What’s going on?” he asks, still smiling, barely able to change his voice from delight to any sort of concern. 

“We were just trying to figure out what’s going on with that couple over there,” Roy says, diplomatic as ever. 

“He’s awful,” Alphonse says matter-of-factly. 

“How do you mean?” 

“Bad vibes.” 

Edward will never really understand what his brother means about ‘vibes,’ but he’s usually right. Alphonse is perceptive, but not always good at explaining how he’s perceptive. Edward used to think this was an artefact of having been re-embodied so recently, but then it never changed - Alphonse just goes quiet sometimes trying to understand everything, like a thread that needs to be untangled from the gears of a sewing-machine.

“Care to expand on that?” Roy asks. 

Alphonse squints, shakes his head. He thinks. Roy looks at him quizzically, clearly wanting to say something else but not wanting to overwhelm.

“I can't explain him. But -" he pauses and thinks, like he's trying to come up with a word or figure out a problem.

"I - I think that girl might not have had a body for a while,” he finally says, and _that’s_ some kind of revelation. Edward didn’t know souls could be bound to anything but human vessels in other worlds. 

He's still watching the couple for signs of trouble. The man nods, and the woman takes Olivier’s hand. Edward doesn't like it at all. Maybe because Winry would pull her wrench out if he tried to give her permission like that for anything. 

They dance slowly but prettily, Olivier guiding her through spins and dips, and then picking her up. Show-off. The girl beams briefly and then ducks when she's let down, like she's trying to shrink. 

“See how she moves?” Alphonse asks. 

Roy shrugs, clearly not understanding, but Edward sees it. It makes sense of the fear and the confusion he sees, and he realizes too that this is why he can read her fear so easily. It’s like how Alphonse used to get nervous right after he was restored, unsure of how he could and couldn’t move, unsure of the connections between his brain and his physical form.

“I could ask her!” he says. “Then at least she'd know she isn't alone. You think the General would let me cut in?”

Edward and Roy almost fall over each other laughing. Edward once tried to separate Olivier from a conquest of hers, and it wasn’t pretty. It's just like Alphonse, too, trying to start a body-regaining support group with an otherworldly woman. 

“You could try,” Roy starts. 

“Be ready to run.” Edward finishes. 

Edward doesn’t know how he feels about being so familiar with Roy. He doesn’t dislike it, but nor does he like it. 

"Don't," Roy says, using all the gravity in his voice, the way he used to give them instructions as children, "Don't mention that you know where she came from."

"I won't," Alphonse says, mustering all the gravity with which he accepted orders as a child.

Alphonse squares his shoulders and walks into the fray. Edward can see him tap Olivier on the shoulder, polite but confident, and sees Olivier yield with a smile that's bare, but genuine. It’s surprising the ease with which Alphonse charms everybody, so that he feels comfortable even cutting short Olivier’s surely flirtation with a pretty girl, which the General, tough and cold as she is most of the time, doesn’t handle well. But Alphonse knows everyone is weak to him, his joy, his easy maneuvering through anything social. Edward doesn’t understand. 

Pretty soon he’s dancing with the girl, chatting easily, laughing, less flashy than Olivier but no less attentive. The man she came with - her boyfriend - is glaring again. 

Olivier’s talking to him. Now he's glaring at Olivier.

Oh, this is going to get bad faster than he thought, isn’t it?

Alphonse looks at her very intently and, Edward assumes, asks her how she lost and regained her body - _it happened to me too,_ Edward imagines his brother saying, _it’s all right, I know what it’s like!_

The woman shakes her head, starts pushing at Alphonse.

"It's not like that!" she exclaims loud enough that the music can't cover it up, and with all the indignation of someone who knows that's exactly the way it is and doesn't want to admit it yet. "It's _not_!" 

The man runs toward her. Olivier slams him back into the wall they’re standing next to. Here’s the chaos. Edward shakes off the wine-fog as best as he can and braces for a fight.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd apologize for this but I don't know where it came from either.


End file.
